276 JOURNAL, BOMBAY JSATUHAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. ^IX. 



feed with the vultures and crows waiting patiently on the ground near by, but I 

 have never noticed any familiarity of this sort when wild dogs were worrying 

 a carcase, 



G. H. EVANS, Lt.-Col., f. l. s. 



Rangoon, 26<^ Novernher 1908. 



No. XXXIV.— THE FEAR OF MAN IN WILD ANIMALS. 



There was a time when it would have been regarded as impious to suggest 

 that man was not a specially created being, superior to all other forms of life, 

 and in fact from the very beginning of all things on a different plane from the 

 beasts of the field. He was not in former times included in works on natural 

 history, and any suggestion of his connection with the anthropoid apes, or his 

 descent by a collateral branch from a common original type would in the 

 middle ages have in all probability been punished by burning at the stake. 

 But we have changed all that. The discovery of the famous Spy and 

 Neanderthal remains, comprising skulls of human beings of an inferior stage of 

 cranial capacity ; of the Dryopithecus, a highly developed form of extmct 

 anthropoid ape, existent in the South of France in Miocene times, and perhaps 

 an ancestor of man or a divergent branch from the same origin ; and of Pithe- 

 canthropus erectus, the missing link, whose fossil remains have been discovered 

 in Java ; all these, taken in conjunction with the Darwinian theory of the 

 origin of species, have led us to change our views, and to ascribe to man a 

 primordial progenitor in no respect differing in kind from those of the so-called 

 lower animals. 



So long as man was looked upon as a type of the deity, possessed of inborn 

 divine attributes, there is nothing surprising in his being termed the lord of 

 creation, to whom was ascribed a subtle power over all other animals, which 

 were supposed to be possessed of a natural fear of the image of God. But 

 with the advance of science this verdict of our ancestors can no longer be 

 accepted, and it is necessary that the question whether the so-called lower 

 animals have any inherent fear of man, or not, should be investigated. 



Facts do not bear out this presupposed psychic superiority of man. It has 

 been found that in places where he has been hitherto unknown, man's presence 

 is no more productive of dread in the animal world than is that of other living 

 things. Thus, Darwin relates that in one islatid that be visited, the doves 

 could be handled, and even attempted to settle on the heads of the human 

 intruders. The great auk, now extinct, perhaps largely owing to its confiding 

 nature, had no fear of man, nor have penguins and other birds in the more 

 remote regions of the earth. The absence of timidity on the part of the 

 American bison undoubtedly led to its practical extermination ; whilst a similar 

 fearlessness has been noticed on the part of whales, and in some places of the 

 great seals known as sea-lions. The early mariners who braved the icy terrors 

 of the Arctic seas encountered a profusion of animal life which regarded the 

 presence of man with indifference ; and Sir Harry Johnston discovered a 



